In this article, I’ll show you how to efficiently cross promote your sites and blogs.

Why cross-promotion works

Now, when I publish a post, I have hundreds of visitors within minutes. Regarding Twitter, with almost 6000 followers, I can tell you that each time I tweet a link, it receive at least 50 unique visitors.

As an example, hear are CatsWhoBlog stats for the ten first days of July. As you can see, CatsWhoCode is the website that provide the most traffic to CWB (Exepted Google, of course)

Tips for efficient cross-promotion

Avoid announcement posts: They suck. Excepetd in rare cases, that kind of post (Which is nothing more than an advertisment) will be extremely quickly forgotten by your regular readers and will not attract new visitors.

Promote the useful way Instead of asking your readers to visit your new site, make them want to go see it. For example, you can introduce your new blog by using it as an example. This is what I’ve done on this CWC post named How to create a side blog with WordPress 3.0. The post is an useful tutorial which use my coupons page as an example. Result: 288 Retweets as I type this post.

Don’t be boring: I may be stating the obvious, but boring your users with repeated announcement or tweets will not make them visit your new site at all.
Making a site popular takes lot of time, even if you already have an established blog. Don’t rush your readers, focus on creating good content for them, and they’ll visit your new blog sooner or later.

Don’t use your ad space for your own projects: Excepted in rar cases, you should sell your ad space, not use it for your own projects. Why? Because as the blog owner you can use your content to promote another site of yours, and this will work better than putting a graphic banner in your sidebar.

And you, do you cross-promote your blogs? Do you plan to do it soon? Let me know.

Launching a new blog is never easy. First, you have to make it known to the audience and get it indexed by search engines. But the biggest part of the work is to show your authority and make visitors come back to your blog. After launching several websites myself, I’m going to show you 5 tips to launch your blog successfully.

Start working before your blog is live

A young blog have to prove it’s usefulness and the blogger behind it have to show his ability to keep the blog running. This is why you should always have 10 to 20 posts ready to be published when launching your blog.

In order to keep your first visitors interested, it is a good idea to publish often (Once a day or once every two days) but don’t forget to always put quality over quantity.

Don’t waste your time with a “Welcome on my blog” post. Excepted if you’re already well known from another blog, people don’t care about who you are. What they’re looking for is quality content. They’ll get to know you later.

Communicate

While success is definitely not going to happen without quality content, content is nothing if you don’t promote it. People will not guess that you have a cool blog. It’s your job to told them about.

So, how to communicate about your new blog? First, get on Twitter and start making friends. To gain attention from more experienced bloggers, retweet their posts, digg/bump/stumble when they ask for it and then, start the conversation.

Twitter is really a great tool to promote your blog, but of course, that’d be too easy if you just had to create a Twitter account and tweet about how great your blog is.
Another efficient way to make new friends and get your blog known is joining a forum. I just created one on CatsWhoBlog where bloggers can meet with others and discuss blogging or monetization.
Have a look at it, and join if you like..

Cross promote your new blog on your other sites

One of my favorite promotion technique is cross-promotion: The “art” of using site A to promote site B, and vice-versa. If you already own a blog, don’t hesitate to use it to promote your new site. Try to avoid boring anouncement posts and introduce your new blog on a more subtle way.
A good example is this post I wrote on CatsWhoCode, which used my other site PHP Snippets as a live demo.

If you don’t have any other blogs, what about finding a blogger in your niche and cross-promote your respective blogs? I have never tried it myself, but that sounds like a good plan.

Work as hard as you can

Despite what some people (those who try to make you buy their clickbank products) says, success is not going to happen without work. While there’s no miracle formula for success, from my own experience I can say that if you have the following 4 points:

• Interesting content
• Frequent updates
• Heavy promotion
• Strong communication

Then it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be successful. A good example of it is Jad Limcaco, owner of Design Informer.

In less than 6 months, due to his hard work, dedication and strong communication skills, Jad managed to make his blog popular among the design community, even if the competition is particulary hard in that niche.

Don’t give up

I already said it numerous times, but time is the blogger’s best friend. Today CatsWhoCode.com is pretty popular in its niche, but two years ago it was just “one more web development” blog.
I had to work very hard to make what CWC is today. I had to write, promote, and more important, I had to believe the blog had the potential to be successful.

Sometimes you may be tempted to say “I failed. I worked hard but my blog isn’t successful”. It happens to everyone and it happened to me. But don’t give up. A blog is rarely successful before at least one year of presence on the internet.

Blogging is not a sprint. It’s a long distance run.

Please use the techniques shown this post reasonably and don’t spam any sites. Spam is not an efficient SEO technique and is penalized by Google.

Commenting guidelines

In order to get a real traffic and seo benefit from the sites you’re going to find, always post relevant comments and use your real name, not a keyword. Also, don’t paste links in the comment text.

Finding .edu or .gov blogs using Google

In order to find .edu or .gov blogs using Google, you simply have to use Google search box and a few special parameters.

Let’s give it a try. Paste the following code in Google.com search box:

site:.edu inurl:blog "post a comment"

Google just returned you thousands of results: sites which have .edu and blog in their url, as well as “post a comment” in the page. easy, isn’t it?

Finding .gov blogs is extremely easy as well. The only thing you have to do is to change the extension in the query:

site:.gov inurl:blog "post a comment"

Using the inurl parameter, you can find lots of things, such as wikis. Though, be warned that modifying wikis for promotional or SEO purposes is not a good thing and that it may produce more harm than good.

site:.edu inurl:wiki

How to find blogs with CommentLuv

CommentLuv is a free WordPress plugin which automatically create a link (generally dofollow) to the commenter last post. Of course, leaving a comment on a CommentLuv enabled blog is good for your SEO.

But now, how to find blogs with CommentLuv? Just use the following query and enjoy Google results. The text within quotes is the text that must be contained in the page, and “blogging tips” are just keywords related to what you’re looking for.

"Enable CommentLuv" blogging tips

By the way, some time ago I compiled a list of quality blogs with CommentLuv, you might want to have a look.

Finding blog with the “Top Commenters” widget

Top Commenters is another free WordPress plugin which reward top commenters with a link, generally in the blog sidebar. It used to be very popular but seems its popularity decreased. Anyways, using Google it is still pretty easy to find some blogs with this widget enabled:

"Top Commenters" make money

Good luck in your backlink search, and please remember to stay reasonable.

By the way, did you noticied that I just created a forum on CatsWhoBlog? It is new but already active. Click here to join and let’s discuss blogging, monetization, WordPress and more.

Promoting WordPress themes is a profitable niche right now, but as the competition is becoming harder every day there’s a few things to know in order to be successful. Here are 5 expert tips taken from my experience as a successful WordPress affiliate marketer.

Launch a WordPress focused blog

There’s a bunch of really cool blogs focused to WordPress so standing out of the crowd may be a bit harder than some years ago, but if you have interesting posts I’m pretty sure you can create a popular WordPress related blog.

Use a theme gallery

Classical ads are often seen as annoying by readers. Lots of people won’t click on it just because they think adverts == evil. But if you display a gallery of your favorite premium themes, you’re not advertising, you’re showcasing. People will be more likely to click on your affiliate links if they provide a real value to them.

A good example of a premium theme gallery can be seen on my blog WPRecipes. Althought I haven’t updated the themes for at least one year, the gallery is still profitable and get good feedback by my readers.

Promote the programs that works

Due to the popularity of WordPress themes, lots of people decided to create their own WordPress theme shop. Of course, most of them failed, because their themes wasn’t that great, because they didn’t managed to promote them correctly, or both.

This is why you shouldn’t waste your time promoting themes that won’t sell and focus primarily on the established sites. In my opinion, you should promote:

• WooThemes
• ThemeForest
• Templatic
• Headway
• StudioPress

Those five are serious companies, and those programs work the best for me. Though, feel free to try other programs and see how they perform on your blog.

Lists of themes works great

On my blogs, I have wrote some lists of themes, grouped by subject. For example, you can have a look to my 10 professional WordPress themes to start your online business or to the 8 awesome WordPress themes to sell your products online.

Those posts can be a very effective way to sell WordPress themes if the subject is interesting. Just stay reasonable and don’t publish 3 lists like this per week, otherwise you’ll bore your readers.

Another interesting option to consider is to mix free and premium themes in a list.

Manage your affiliate links properly

Making money with affiliate marketing is one thing, but if you’re looking to the long term, you’ll have to manage your affiliate links properly.
Affiliate links can be changed by the product owner, products can be updated, or even deleted. The products which sell today will probably not sell that much in three years. For those reasons, you should always use your own site to redirect to your affiliate links.

There’s a lot of ways to cloak and manage your affiliate links. You could for example create a “affiliate” directory on your server and use the php function header() to redirect to your affiliate links.

There’s also a lot of free WordPress plugin that can be useful for affiliate marketers:

• Redirection
• SEO Smart Links
• GoCodes
• Affiliate Links Cloaker
• Ninja Affiliate (The one I use, not free unfortunely)

Anyways, nevermind which tool help you to manage your affiliate links, the more important is to be able to manage it quickly and efficiently.

So what can you do? Let’s have a look to a really interesting solution: Displaying your feed count for an average of X days, which is more relevant in my opinion than the current Feedburner algorythm.

The problem with Feedburner

The chicklet quickly became a way for people and advertisers to estimate the popularity of a blog, despite the fact that the count can be quite easily hijacked.

Since 3 or 4 months, Feedburner have lots of problems, and the count looks everything but relevant, as you can see below:

After writing about those problems last week on The Blog Herald, someone told me on Twitter that he believe that Feedburner chicklet now display the number of people who have read your feeds the past day.

So, what does that mean? If you publish daily posts on your blogs, you shouldn’t notice any big differences. But if you publish, let’s say, once or twice a week, your count can be high the day after you published a post, then be a lot lower.

Displaying your average RSS readers

Althought there’s no perfect solution to this problem, a way to get a more relevant count is to use Feedburner API to get the counts of 7 days, then display the average. I have found this method which looks quite good, but is limited to WordPress. The code below will work on any PHP sites with cURL enabled.

The first thing to do is to paste the function in your source code. If you want to use the code in a WordPress blog, you should paste it in the functions.php file.

function get_average_readers($feed_id,$interval = 7){
	$today = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("now"));
	$ago = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("-".$interval." days"));
	$feed_url="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=".$feed_id."&dates=".$ago.",".$today;
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed_url);
	$data = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
	$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

	$nb = 0;
	foreach($xml->feed->children() as $circ){
		$nb += $circ['circulation'];
	}

	return round($nb/$interval);
}

Once you added the PHP function to your site, you can use it to get your blog feed average readers. Paste the following where you want to display the count, and don’t forget to replace catswhocode by your feed name on line 2.

<?php
$nb = get_average_readers('catswhocode');
echo "I have ".$nb." RSS readers";
?>

The function display an average of 7 days, but you can define the desired number of days using a second parameter:

<?php
$nb = get_average_readers('catswhocode', 30);
echo "I have ".$nb." RSS readers";
?>

Round numbers for a better display

Did you noticied that CatsWhoBlog has been redesigned? On my sidebar, I’m using my “average feed readers” function to display an estimate of my RSS readers. In order to have a better display, I have replaced the last two numbers by zeros and added a plus sign.

This way, if I have 1287 readers, you’ll see “1200+ readers” instead. If you want to do the same on your blog, it is very easy using some basic PHP:

<?php
$nb = get_average_readers('catswhocode', 30);
echo substr_replace($nb ,"00",-2).'+ readers';
?>

That’s all for today. Hope you’ll enjoy the trick! Let me know if you have any ideas to enhance it. If you’d like to help me promote this post, please Bump it.

In this article, I’m going to discuss the phenomenon a bit, and then showcase 10 absolutely awesome custom designed blog posts.

Should you use custom designed posts on your blog?

But custom designed blog posts also have flaws: it can be difficult to read or navigate, and visitors might not notice it is your blog! If you’re displaying ads on your regular blog posts, advertisers may not like your custom designed posts because ads aren’t displayed on them.

So excepted if you’re a web designer, my advice should be to stay away from them. But of course, feel free to experiement. Now, let’s have a look at this showcase of 10 gorgeous blog post designs.

Jason Santa Maria: On the subject of design

Design Informer: The process behind good illustration

Design Informer: What I wish someone told me about freelancing

Smashing Magazine: The death of the boring blog post

Marcel Uekermann: vertical farming

Paddy Donelly: Life below 600px

Sam Hardacre: In search of the perfect sketchbook

ColdHeat: Goldfinger

Kyle Fielder: Hey speedy, slow yourself down

Avoid Contact With Eyes: Zombie movie poster collection

And you, do you ever used custom blog posts on your blog? Do you plan to do it soon?

So, what did I do to get my new blog indexed by Google in only one day? I just used a few “techniques” that even a novice can use.

Be patient

To give you an example, www.phpsnippets.info is already indexed in Google, but rankings are bad: As I’m writing these lines, the blog is currently ranked on Google 8th page for the term PHP Snippets. But I can bet that in 3 months, it will be on page 1.

Being patient will not make Google index your blog more quickly, but it will prevent you from frustration, which is in my opinion one of the worst enemies of a blogger.

Use Google webmaster tools and sitemap.xml

Google have a service named Google Webmaster tools, which provides you with detailed reports about your pages visibility on Google.

The first thing to do is to install the free WordPress plugin “XML Sitemaps”, activate it and generate a sitemap. Once done, login to Google Webmaster tools and submit your sitemap. The submitted sitemap will help Google to know about all your web pages.

Note that a sitemap.xml will help Google to index your blog, but it will not enhance your rankings. Also, seems that a page with no incomming links will be ignored by Google, even if the page is in your sitemap.

Get links to your posts

Getting backlinks to your blog is probably one of the most effectives way to get a good ranking in Google results pages. In case of a new blog, backlinks from established sites will definitely help you to get it indexed by Google extremely quickly.
Most people are focusing on building links to their homepage and forget to build links to their posts. It’s a bad thing in my opinion, because most people are searching Google for an information, not for a blog in particular.

Being the first on Google for a generic term such as CSS buttons is indeed very good for your blog. It brings 3000+ unique visitors to CatsWhoCode per month.

So, how to get links to your posts? It’s quite simple, and if your content is valuable, easy: Use social media and social bookmarking sites. Spread your posts using Twitter, add them to sites such as Delicious, DesignFloat, Dzone or DesignBump and post them on feed aggregators (OctoFinder, FeedAdage)

What if text converted to affiliate links…magically?

But people who have a bigger blog (Approximately 500 UV/day, 25+ posts) and who promote more than 20 affiliate programs may have a hard time managing all the links. For example, the company behind a product may decide to change your affiliate link and you’ll have to replace it everywhere you inserted it. Depending on your blog size, it will be very time-consuming. And I’m not talking about the loss of profit.

For that reason, I started to use an affiliate cloacker some years ago. It was the free “Redirection” WordPress plugin. It saved me a lot of time and hassle. Unfortunely, it didn’t helped me to make more money with my blog.

But being a “quite popular” blogger have lots of good sides, one of them is definitely the presents companies are offering to me. Last week, I received a WordPress plugin called Ninja Affiliate. At first, I wasn’t interested by replacing my good old “Redirection” plugin. But I decided to give a go to Ninja Affiliate.

Converting keywords to high-converting links

So, what does Ninja Affiliate looks like? Once installed, you’ll find a new link under the “Tools” menu in your WordPress dashboard. From there, you’ll be able to add affiliate links into Ninja, cloak them and see how many times they have been clicked.

That’s cool, but the best is yet to come: For each affiliate link entered into the plugin, you can define a list of keywords that’d be automatically replaced by the related affiliate link. For example if you’re promoting WooThemes on your blog, insert “WordPress Themes” as a keyword to convert and Ninja will transform this keyword into a money making link. Of course, you can limit how many times a link can be displayed max.

Why my profits increased with Ninja

As you saw in the screenshot above, defining a list of keywords for a particular program is very easy. After being convinced by Ninja Affiliate I took 45 minutes to create “Ninja links” and associate keywords to them. The plugin did the rest and converted keywords from my blog posts into affiliate links. The same day, I made a comission from a program I haven’t sold since weeks. Since last week, I have made roughly $300 in affiliate comissions on this site alone, which is 30% more than what I earned past weeks.

Conclusion

Ninja Affiliate is priced $97, which is quite expensive. Though, there’s two things to note: Getting $97 back in affiliate comissions is definitely easy and you’ll probably get your money back within one or two weeks, depending of your blog popularity.

The second thing to note is that Ninja is offering a 60 days money back guarantee. You can grab the plugin, test it and see if it works for you. If it don’t, no worries, just request your money back.

.edu sites are often seen as quality sites because the .edu TLD is reserved. This is why many SEO experts thinks that .edu backlinks are a very good thing for your site. In this article, I have compiled more than 150 .edu websites, blogs and forums where you can comment and get a quality backlink for free.

Please don’t abuse those sites. If you leave comments on some of them, make sure your comment ins’t spammy.

Why .edu backlinks are great for SEO

In 2001, registrations of .edu domain names has been restricted to post-secondary institutions and organizations that are accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education’s list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies.

Due to the fact that .edu domain can’t be registered by anyone and are reserved to educational institutions, many SEO experts thinks a backlink from an .edu site is good for SEO, because Google is seeing the .edu site as a serious source.

Commenting guidelines

While it can be tempting to pick up my list and post quick messages on the listed .edu sites just to get a backlink, I’d like to insist on the fact that spamming has never been a good SEO technique.

You should pick up 5 to 10 sites per day, read one or two blog entries from each site, and leave an useful, non spammy comment. Remember that SEO is a long distance run, not a sprint.

Finally…the list!

Enought talk for now, here’s is the list. There’s a bit more than 150 links, just in case some of them don’t work anymore.

Want more?

With the 150 .edu backlinks I gave you, there’s no doubt that you will enhance your blog SEO. But don’t forget that the competition is pretty hard, depending of your blog niche.

I you want to make sure to completely dominate search engine ranking, I know something that might interest you. It is a package of file containing links to sites where you can get backlinks. It looks like my list of .edu, but there’s not 150 sites, there’s 5000!

In detail, 5000 backlinks package contains links to 16 PR 9 sites, 62 PR 8 sites, 171 PR 7 sites, 227 PR 6 sites, 176 PR 5 sites, 139 PR 4 sites, 259 DoFollow forums, 1070 DoFollow blogs, 2500 .edu sites and 50 .gov sites. That’s quite a lot, isn’t it?

The 5000 backlinks package cost $97. I know, $97 is a sum and not something youspend just for fun. But in the blogging industry, if you have traffic, you’ll earn money. And how to get traffic? By search engines, which give importance to the amount of backlinks you have. In other terms, buying the 5000 backlinks package is spending $97 and get $XXX to $XXXX in return.

There’s a increasing anger from lots of blog owners and I’ve decided not to stay silent on the question. Yes, I’m for blocking Adblock. Why? Here are my reasons.

Websites have a cost

Another great example are big sites such as Smashing Magazine or Nettuts: They publish big articles everyday, written by multiple talentuous authors. On these sites, authors are paid $150 to $250. How can a blog can handle such costs without advertising?

Ads allow bloggers to publish free content

Free content is published because bloggers like to share their knowledge with the community. But if a blogger make enought money online to stop working for a company and dedicate to his blog full time, the blog will only be better and have more content published.
It’s a definitive win-win for both the blogger and his audience.

On serious blogs, ads are never intrusive

I’m not talking about spammy sites, (where I can’t blame people for using an ad blocker) but serious blogs such as Smashing Magazine, PSDTuts or Problogger don’t use intrusive ads like popups, full screen flash ads, etc.

On my sites, I use mostly BuySellAds, which loads fast and are always relevant to my content. So if ads like those are annoying a reader, it is more because he think that advertising is evil than because the ad is really annoying.

Adsense is rarely annoying as well, and blog owners using it should definitely implement this technique to make it load after the site content and guarantee a better user experience to your audience.

Making money online is not a crime

Yes, I make money online, and yes, I’m happy with it. It’s way better to be your own boss and work on something you love instead of being the slave of a boss. Is it greedy? I don’t think so.

The internet is the only place where anyone, regardless of his age, race or sex have the same chances of success. I know people from poor countries that will be washing cars right now if they didn’t succeed with their website.

Blocking Adblock is easier than you may think

If you’re using WordPress, developer Thaya Kareeson created a plugin called Anti Adblock. Once installed, the plugin will detect if someone is viewing your content without ads and if so, will display a message explaining why ad revenue are important for blogs and their owners.

The plugin don’t properly block Adblock, but if this is what you want to do, modifying the plugin should be easy. I didn’t had a deep look at the code, but if many of you wants me to have a look and tell you how you can block Adblock for good, let me know and I’ll write a post about it.

My opinion

Right now, I didn’t blocked Adblock on any of my sites, but I should definitely make some tests and see if my traffic decrease. I’m pretty sure to get comments like “If you block Adblock, I’ll leave your site”, but I really think that if a site have good content, people will want to read it, even if that mean to shut down adblock.

On a side note, have you seen the new coupons & promo codes page on my website?